


Not by Zeal Alone

by merriman



Category: Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)
Genre: Gen, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:13:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28230699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merriman/pseuds/merriman
Summary: After the fall of Naktamun, Hazoret and the other survivors have a journey to undertake and decisions to make. Hazoret must become more than she has been, if she is to be the sole remaining god of a pantheon that once numbered eight.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 2
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Not by Zeal Alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CerberAsta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CerberAsta/gifts).



> Hazoret is my favorite of the Amonkhet gods and this was a wonderful opportunity to explore her as a character. I loved digging into the lore of the world and (finally) getting around to looking at the full events of War of the Spark. This is set prior to War of the Spark, so before the return of Samut and the other planeswalkers to turn off the Immortal Sun.

In the wake of the second sun's rising, night came to the deserts of Amonkhet for the first time and with it came the cold and the wind and the shrieks of the dead as they tried to get through the shield Hazoret had raised around those few who had managed to flee with her. Two Khenra prowled the edges of the shield, weapons ready, and Hazoret watched them from her position in the center. They were twins, of course, young initiates who had not yet passed even one of the trials. But as she watched them she thought that no, the trials were no longer how a god must judge her people. They had been tools of a betrayal so vast, her mind bent to try and fathom it. 

Huddled under the protection of the shelters Hazoret had constructed were many of the others who had escaped the massacre at Naktamun. She was pleased and relieved to see several crops of acolytes among the survivors. Some of the youngest were watched over by their elders, but the rest took turns sleeping, guarding each other in the night like the units they had been raised to be. 

Raised to what? Hazoret wondered, rising among the people to walk the edges of the dome in counterpoint to the twins. To what purpose had this all been made? She had never been one for thinking about the future, aside from the inevitable return of the God-Pharaoh, but now? Now there was desperate need for planning.

Planning was not Hazoret's strong suit. That had always been Kefnet and Bontu, sometimes Oketra. But Hazoret and Rhonas weren't planners. They were doers. Hazoret had a feeling like the grinding of glass deep in her gut that she would need to become more than she had been now. She would need to be Kefnet and Oketra, Rhonas and Bontu. Perhaps she had been more once, long ago. Kefnet would have helped her puzzle it out. But Kefnet was dead, along with the rest.

In the clear, cold night of the desert, Hazoret, the goddess of zeal, looked not towards the fallen city of Naktamun, not towards the Horn Monument that she had always looked to for her faith, but to the wastes. There were ruins out there, long dead cities of which she could not recall more than the barest whisper. They had to find somewhere better than this to gather their strength and take back their home.

* * *

Food was a necessity of survival, but fortunately, Hazoret's survivors were good at hunting. They brought down a sand wurm the next day and Hazoret cheered with the rest as the hunting party - the remnants of Zhaf Crop - returned with their prize. There wasn't much meat on a sand wurm, but it provided enough for everyone to get a meal. Hazoret ripped some of the meat right off the bones and ate it raw, as did two of her viziers. Some had turned from her as she had fled with the others, but the ones who had followed had shown themselves to be her true children.

Anmur wiped the sand wurm's blood from his jaws and looked up to her.

"Hazoret," he said, when Hazoret favored him with a look. "We will need water," he whispered to her. "I have been telling all that we will find an oasis, but some are beginning to doubt."

When Hazoret turned to look him fully in the eyes he sighed.

"They have been through much, Fervent One," he told her, not breaking her gaze. "This is not what they were trained to endure and while they are all as strong as one could wish, we are still but mortals. We will need water. Soon. What little we managed to bring with us is dwindling."

"Then we will find water," Hazoret told him, grasping this immediate need with the same passion with which she had always taken on her duties. "Send me any with divining skills. We will be traveling to Ramunap. We must find the way."

For this, she must be Kefnet, seeing paths that did not exist, looking to the future.

* * *

Traveling across the wastes was a treacherous business. Hazoret had never questioned whether that would be true -- the creatures that sometimes broke through into Naktamun had been proof enough of that. You had only to look out through the shimmering shield of the Hekma to know that the deserts of Amonkhet were deadly.

Still, if one was strong, one could survive. Hazoret found she did not even need to tell the survivors -- all her children now -- how they must travel. Even the youngest of them, some no more than babes in slings on their caretakers' backs, took on the determination they would need to cross the sands. 

The best of the hunters kept to the front and the back of the group, with two avens flying above them to give warning of anything approaching. Several times each day they had to stop and push back hordes of the wandering dead or the great beasts of the desert. The remaining avens flew to find water, returning with precious skins of it to share among the group. 

They had just made camp for the night, setting several giant locusts on spits over the fires - when the sand under them rumbled with the approach of something immense. Hazoret grabbed her spear and saw that many of her children did the same with their own weapons.

With the skill of long and hard training, they readied themselves as their aven watchers sped through the sky to them.

"Cerodon!" one of them cried as she landed. "Heading right for us!"

Hazoret took up a position ahead of her children. It would take all of them to bring down this foe.

The cerodon roared its arrival, sending a hot wind through the camp. Hazoret stood steady. Her people would be lost without her. They had no other gods left. While every muscle in her body ached to leap and tear at the cerodon, she held herself back. She could not afford to lose any fight.

Though her people fought bravely, passionately, still three lost their lives against the cerodon. That they lost so few was a wonder, and Hazoret herself made sure that she disposed of their remains with fire to keep the Curse of Wandering from taking hold. 

"This is now our ritual," she told her children as they watched the three pyres burn. "We burn our dead, that they will join the desert and the sky without wandering, without service, free."

She looked out among her children, standing tall and proud despite injuries. Rhonas would have been proud of each and every one of them today, of that she was sure. The strength of her children was an inspiration even to a god.

* * *

"The ruins lie one day's march from here," one of the avens told her at last. His name was Fersil and he had been one of Oketra's viziers, but now he had cast aside his cartouches and spent what time he was not flying with Hapatra and Djeru, conferring with those of the mortals who had taken on the leadership of their people. Hazoret watched her children mingle when they camped to rest and took note of who worked with whom, and who held back from all.

Where once Hazoret would have rallied her children to her and roused them with the fervor of a goal within their grasp, now she sat back and thought. These of her children were not initiates finished with four of five trials, skills at their peaks. They were viziers from all five temples, crops that had yet to begin constructing an obelisk, children too young to even be considered acolytes. 

"There are wanderers," Fersil warned. "Between here and there. Many of them. We will have to fight."

That, at least, Hazoret was confident about. Fighting was something she could do and do well.

"Good," she said to Fersil. "Gather half of the best fighters. We will go ahead and the rest will follow to keep everyone else safe. There are not enough of us left that we can leave any behind."

Bontu would have been disgusted by such a statement, but Bontu was dead and Hazoret was alive and truly, weren't they surviving at the cost of the rest of Naktamun? Ambition could wait until survival was assured. 

The horde of wandering undead wasn't the largest they had seen, but when Hazoret saw of whom it was made, she knew that Bontu laughed from whatever afterlife she had made her way to. Somehow many of the dead from the massacre at Naktamun had found their way here already, wandering the wastes only to face down those who had seen them fall just days before.

Hazoret could tell that her children knew whom they faced as they shifted their grips on their weapons, steadied their stances in the sand. Without looking down at them, she let them hear a growl come deep from her chest.

"We will send them on to the afterlife!" she cried out. "We will give them the deaths they deserved!"

With a cheer, her children dove forward into the fray, cutting down the undead bodies of old friends and teachers alike. As Hazoret cleaved through swarms of them, she knew they would build a pyre whose flame would match the suns.

* * *

The ruins of Ramunap were eerie, a strange echo of Naktamun in some ways, and utterly unfamiliar in others. As her children explored in squads, looking to secure the most intact buildings for themselves, Hazoret entered the remains of a temple. Inside, carved upon the wall, a giant scorpion-headed figure stood outlined in lazotep, with the images of people carved below in poses of prayer and thanks. On another wall a smaller carving showed the scorpion figure standing over a woman who cut into the flesh of another. Next to that the two women knelt and gave thanks to the scorpion god.

Hazoret stared at these images. Before its dreadful role in destroying her home, had this being once been like her? That question was answered as she turned to look at the entry she had come in through and saw eight figures arrayed over the doorway, herself among them, along with the scarab god and the locust god, all shown together. As she stood there, considering this strange and somewhat unwelcome sight, the barest scrape of sand on stone alerted her to the presence of others. A single sniff told her this was not any of those she had crossed the sands with, no. 

With blinding speed, Hazoret spun, spear at the ready, only to face a group of gathered people. As she looked at their faces, naga and human and minotaur and aven and khenra alike, she realized that she knew them. She knew them all. Dissenters, cast from Naktamun to be claimed by the wastes. These were the ones who had survived to take shelter in the city that had once been their home before the God-Pharaoh's arrival.

"What do you want here?" asked a naga, slithering forward to point a curved sword at Hazoret herself. Hazoret recognized him as Kheshri, who had made it all the way through Bontu's trial, then left her home two days after arriving, crying that no one could sit in luxury knowing he had killed his best friend.

"Sanctuary," Hazoret said, drawing on all she could recall of Oketra. Kheshri had been offered a place as one of Oketra's viziers, but had left to seek a more glorious death through the trials. "Naktamun is fallen," she told him. "The second sun has risen. The Hours have come and the God-Pharaoh with them. The city is in ruin, the gods all dead but for me. The people all dead but for those who travel with me. We have survived the wastes, as you did."

Kheshri looked at her, flicking out his tongue to taste her words on the air.

"She speaks the truth," said a cracked voice from the shadows at the back of the temple ruin. "The usurper has come and gone, taking with him the lives of your gods and your people. And now also gone is his curse."

The group of dissenters parted to let a sphinx pad through them to face Hazoret. He was a criosphinx, ancient and scarred, but he nodded to Hazoret and bowed his head.

"She has seen the truth," he told the crowd. "She is Hazoret the Fervent, Hazoret the Survivor. Hazoret the Lone God of Amonkhet."

Murmuring started among the group as several members of Hazoret's survivors arrived to stand behind her in the temple's entrance.

Hazoret looked at them all, then turned to look at those who had followed her out into what might have been their doom. She would need them all.

"We must return to our home," she told them, turning to include the entire group. "We must return to Naktamun and reclaim it, fortify it. We cannot let what was done to us define us. We are the survivors of Amonkhet, one way or another. We will tear down the monuments, the obelisks, the temples, the arenas, and begin anew. But there are two gods left here, undead and twisted. We will need to defeat them. We build our strength here. Then we go back and remake our home as it should always have been."


End file.
